REPORT: Unemployment drops to 10.8 percent

Inland Southern California workers apparently are getting back into the job hunt, and it has been a successful process for a lot of them, a report released Friday, March 29 found.

Almost 1,180,000 people in Riverside and San Bernardino counties were drawing paychecks in February, according to the state Employment Development Department. That’s about 28,000 more than 12 months ago and the most in since January 2009.

It also represents a healthy 2.4 percent increase in payroll jobs in the last year, the state reported.

Residents of the Inland counties who had left the workforce came back in considerable numbers during the last year, 14,100 of them. People drop out of the workforce for a number of reasons, including retirement, returning to school and deciding to be a full-time parent, but many over the course of the last few years have left out of the frustration of not being able to find work, especially those whose unemployment benefits have expired.

But the return of so many workers, and the evidence of thousands of new jobs, lowered the unemployment rate to 10.8 percent last month from 11.5 percent in January. The Inland area’s jobless level is at its lowest since it was 10.2 percent in December, 2008.

“Virtually everything in this report is good news in one form or another,” Redlands-based economist John Husing said.

Unemployment for all of California decreased to 9.6 percent in February from 9.8 percent the previous month. The state reported that, statewide, about 725,000 non-farm payroll jobs have been added in the last three years.

jobs.graphic

Also, employers added jobs at a 2.1 percent clip statewide in the last year, meaning that the Inland Empire is currently outpacing the rest of California. Statewide job reports are adjusted to reflect expected seasonal shifts, while reports for cities and counties are not adjusted.

Husing said he was encouraged that the job growth cut across most sectors of the Inland economy. One of the strongest was the hospitality industry; restaurant owners and food service operators were hiring at a brisk clip.

Those are low-wage professions, but employers were also hiring in the Inland area’s distribution centers and at financial, professional and medical offices. There was even a small dose of job growth in the construction industry last month.

Husing noted the decline in jobs through temporary agencies, which suggested that companies feel confident enough about their business volumes to make many of their temp employees permanent.

“This is generally what happens during stage two of a recovery,” he said.

Palbinder Badesha, owner of the Corona office of Express Employment Professionals, a franchised employment agency, said there was an air of recovery but that the economy is not all the way back.

“People who come in to the office looking for work are finding it fairly quickly, including professional people,” Badesha said. “It’s definitely getting better, but it doesn’t seem like we’re back to 2006 yet.”

Badesha added that the demand is solid for people with good training. Welders for manufacturing sites or experienced maintenance mechanics are more likely to find jobs than unskilled workers. “That’s the challenge,” she said. “People will need skills.”

The public sector is still acting as a drag on the Inland economy, and economists worry if the sequestration process, which started March 1, would make this worse.

“Sequestration probably has been a little less of a big deal than people said it would be, but this will unfold over the course of the fiscal year,” said Ben Wright, an economist with Goleta-based California Economic Forecast.

Going forward, Wright said sequestration would have a negative effect, but he predicts it will be a small one.